The General

An Israeli journalist’s six years of conversation with Ariel Sharon.

As far back as I can remember, I remember Arik Sharon. First, he was Arik of the Paratroopers, whose brutal acts of retaliation in the nineteen-fifties, after the War of Independence, exemplified the young Israeli state’s reply to attacks by Palestinian infiltrators. Then he was Arik of Sinai, whose military wits in the battle of Abu Ageila, a strategic crossroads in the eastern Sinai, played an important part in the intoxicating Israeli victory of 1967. Then, in 1971, Sharon was Arik the Terrible, who temporarily eliminated Palestinian terror in the Gaza Strip by using collective punishment, threatening civilians, and applying a shoot-to-kill policy against suspected terrorists. In 1973, he was Arik, King of Israel, who confounded the Egyptians by crossing the Suez Canal, cutting off the Third Army, and turning what could easily have been a terrible defeat into victory. In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, as a civilian minister, he was Arik the Settler, who established more than a hundred Israeli outposts in the West Bank and Gaza, in a hubristic attempt to seize permanent control of large swaths of Palestinian-held territory. “Grab as many hilltops as you can,” he later told the settlers. Finally, he was for us, the young liberals of Israel, Arik the Leper, who, in 1982, led the country into a catastrophic war in Lebanon and bore a great measure of responsibility for the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

As far back as almost every living Israeli can remember, Sharon was in battle, pushing onward, annexing more and more territories to the Jewish state, and depriving it of its last remnants of moral innocence. More than any other single figure in Israel, Sharon led the transformation of a relatively modest and ascetic state into an occupying bully.

When Sharon swept the country into the Lebanon war, he appeared in my nightmares. When some eight hundred Palestinians were slaughtered at Sabra and Shatila, he made me ashamed of being an Israeli. And when he established the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza he caused many Israelis to fear that these settlements, and the occupation of Palestinian territories, would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Zionist enterprise.

As a citizen, and as a writer for the liberal daily Ha’aretz, I was someone whose political life became, in a sense, a life in opposition to Ariel Sharon, to all that he had done and had come to stand for. Indisputably, Sharon had rare military talent, and, unlike other right-wing politicians who specialized in rhetoric and incitement, he had the capacity to shape the reality in which we lived. He played a considerable role in saving the state of Israel in the nineteen-fifties and in 1973. But Sharon also seemed a perversion of the Zionist dream of the strong and fearless Jew.

Then I came to know him. Our first meeting, in the late summer of 1999, began at the Likud Party headquarters in Tel Aviv and continued in a daylong conversation at his home, Sycamore Ranch, a thousand-acre farm in the western Negev. By this time, Sharon was no longer a demon in Israeli political life. He was seventy-one, an affable, nearly irrelevant old general who was serving as the temporary head of a shattered opposition party. He did not talk politics, preferring to tell me at great length about his family’s origins, in Russia. He explained that his inner strength had its source in the fact that, unlike many Israelis, he came from a family that had worked the land for generations. “I never had a political power base,” he said. “The power to do things comes to me from the family and the soil, to which I have a unique attachment.”

Surprisingly, this secular, Israel-born soldier defined himself not as an Israeli but as a Jew. Israel’s raison d’être, he said, is to be the place where the Jews will finally be cured of their mortal illness, their “eternal wandering.” But he had doubts about whether they would, in fact, be cured. He felt a profound uncertainty about the Jews’ ability to maintain sovereignty, and to hold on to the land and to preserve it. He spoke about the Arabs with great envy—they, he said, knew much better how to keep their honor and their land. “If there is something that I respect about the Arabs, it’s the fact that they never change their position,” he said. “The Palestinian leadership did not give up any of its demands, not one inch.”

Sharon took me on a tour of his ranch in a four-by-four, pointing out his orchard, his sheep, his bulls. He said that his primary concern was with the Jewish future: “What will become of the Jews in thirty years’ time, and what will become of them in three hundred years’ time?” He complained that young Israelis didn’t know their Bible. They weren’t familiar with their history. They didn’t feel a right to this land the way he did. “One generation after another is drifting away from anything Jewish,” he said.

Sharon portrayed himself as someone who lived inside Biblical history in a very intimate and palpable way. Whenever he was in Hebron, he said, the thought that for seven years David ruled the city aroused tremendous excitement in him. When he travelled in the Judaean desert, he narrowed his eyes, so as to see not the electricity lines and the modern highways but, instead, Abigail, the wife of Nabal the Carmelite, decked in her necklaces and bracelets, and riding on her donkey—a scene from the First Book of Samuel. And on the road that descends from Beit Aryeh and crosses Shiloh Creek, not far from Beit El, he always stopped to recall another episode from Samuel, in which a runner is sent from the battle of Aphek to Shiloh, forty kilometres away, bearing the bitter news of the capture of the Ark of the Covenant. He always experienced these ancient scenes anew.

At the time of our interview, Prime Minister Ehud Barak had revived peace talks, and there was a general notion that the conflict with the Palestinians might soon end. So, with considerable effort, I tried to bring Sharon back to the political present. I asked him whether the establishment of settlements in Gaza and the West Bank had been a mistake. No, he said. There wasn’t a single shipping container or generator that had been positioned in the territories without a reason. Every settlement was placed in such a way as to consolidate Israeli control of essential regions like the Jordan Valley and the hills overlooking the coastal plain.

Sharon’s charm took me by surprise. Unlike most of Israel’s leaders, who tend to be arrogant and remote, he had empathy and a sense of humor that could even be self-deprecating. He had none of Barak’s haughtiness or Benjamin Netanyahu’s emotional unease. But I was equally surprised by his pessimism. Despite Israel’s military might, he saw the country as a small and fragile state surrounded by hostile countries that would go on wanting to destroy it. As a result, he believed not in peace agreements based on mutual trust but only in non-belligerence agreements based on deterrence. In this Realpolitik, he saw himself as a follower of Henry Kissinger. But, unlike Kissinger, who argued for substantial territorial compromise, Sharon thought that Israel could not risk the little strategic depth it had. Without buffer zones, he argued, Israel would not be able to stand up to new threats when Arab missiles endangered its air superiority.

Sharon was perceptive but not conceptually brilliant; he had charm, but he did not radiate greatness. Sitting in a deep armchair in the living room, as his wife, Lily, offered him muffins on a silver tray, he resembled neither Samson nor Nero. There was something of the overgrown child about him. Grinning, he admitted that he had never had the patience for books on military strategy. What interested him much more was the person, the individual fighter, and what made him attack or lose his balance.

His thinking was not analytical but intuitive, leading him from story to story, from recollection to recollection. He was neither quick nor articulate. His formulations were heavy, like clods of winter earth. Occasionally, Sharon read literature and history, but in a deep sense he was anti-intellectual. Some people who have known Sharon well say that he is a limited, even primitive person. Ideas made him suspicious. What he admired was deeds, facts. Although he was the head of the Likud Party, he saw himself as an heir to the Labor Party. For him, Vladimir Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin, the great Likud forebears, were men of words, of hollow talk. David Ben-Gurion and Yigal Allon, who were leaders of the Labor movement, were men of action, and it was perfectly clear that he felt closer to them. Allon, he said, was the most brilliant commander in the 1948 war: “His concept of national security is the one we should follow.”

Throughout our meeting, Sharon, whose appetite is legendary, plied me with food and drink, and by the time I headed home I was undoubtedly several kilos heavier. As I thought about our conversation, I came to the conclusion that one explanation for Sharon’s power is that he is organic. Without romanticizing him, I found his insistence on land neither rhetorical nor superficial. He had a kind of instinctive intelligence, like a Bedouin tracker or a Cherokee scout. In this, he was an un-Jewish Jew: lacking self-awareness and intellectualism, devoid of complexes, yet the embodiment of the radical Zionist potential. Neither a statesman nor a theoretician, he knew how to strike people at their weak spots and how to win battles by reading a map. He called his autobiography “Warrior.” I thought of him as the samurai of Zionism.

In April, 2001, I returned to Sycamore Ranch. Everything looked different: Sharon had been elected Prime Minister, and not far from the sheepfold was a flock of bulletproof limousines. Security guards were scattered about the property. Sharon’s wife had died, of cancer, and his sons had replaced her as his most constant companions. The collapse of the peace process at Camp David in the summer of 2000 and the eruption of the Al Aqsa intifada in September, after Sharon paid his provocative visit to the Temple Mount, had transformed the irrelevant old general into a beloved grandfather to whom a terrified nation had entrusted its fate. He had been elected by a huge majority to the position he had dreamed of all his life.

Over the next several years, until his recent stroke, I met with him for a series of long interviews, first for Ha’aretz and then for this magazine. I was the first journalist to whom Sharon granted a comprehensive interview after he became Prime Minister, and the most urgent question was whether there was a new Sharon, whether he had become a man of peace, a potential “Israeli de Gaulle.” When I asked whether he would relent on the Palestinian territories, as de Gaulle had on Algeria, his reply was unequivocal: There was no new Sharon. He had no interest in being an Israeli de Gaulle.

And yet everything he was saying now became, in a few years’ time, reconsidered, repudiated, undone.

I asked whether he would advance a separation plan.

“I see no possibility of separation,” he said. “I don’t believe in ‘We’re here and they’re there.’ In my opinion, practically speaking, the possibility doesn’t exist.”

Would he agree to recognize a Palestinian state, even one that would be confined to between forty and fifty per cent of the occupied territories?

“I’ve never said fifty per cent of the territory. I’ve said forty-two per cent. It could be that a bit more is possible. But this would be only in the framework of a non-belligerence agreement for a long and undefined period of time.”

Sharon insisted that even the relatively small Jewish enclaves in Gaza had strategic meaning for Israel. “First of all, they have Zionist importance,” he said. “People say to me, ‘Why don’t you evacuate Kfar Darom’ ”—a settlement of several hundred Israelis in the midst of Palestinian Gaza. “But Kfar Darom is a settlement that was established back in 1946, and it stood firm and it delayed the Egyptian Army for several critical days in 1948. . . . So why should it be evacuated? I see no reason to evacuate it.”

As for whether he would be prepared to evacuate settlements in the framework of a non-belligerence agreement, he snapped, “No. Absolutely not.”

Not even the most isolated settlements in Gaza, like Netzarim?

“No. Not at any price,” Sharon said. “Why is it necessary to evacuate Netzarim? What for? . . . Netzarim has strategic importance. It was built as part of a concept that a barrier has to be created between Khan Yunis and Gaza City, and that we should have access to the coast. Therefore Netzarim is of enormous importance to security. It is essential.”

Sharon said these things for our interview. Informally, he was even tougher. He made it clear that he did not believe in peace agreements. He said that the 1948 War of Independence had not ended, and that we must be prepared for a struggle that would last for generations. He argued that the unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon carried out by Ehud Barak in May, 2000, had led Yasir Arafat to believe that Israel had softened and that he could acquire more at no cost. Only two years before Sharon erected the separation wall, he scorned the idea. “How are you going to separate?” he had said. “Are you going to put up a wall in Jerusalem? Can you maintain a barrier at all inside a city? And you have to have security zones. You can’t make a separation along the Green Line”—that is, the pre-1967 borders. “So what are you going to do? Separate the Arabs from their lands?”

Sharon wore jeans, a light-blue shirt, and Birkenstock sandals for the meeting, and, affable as always, he insisted that I eat a large breakfast with him: salad and cheese, sardines and olives. During the meal, he said he would prefer that we not talk about politics. “I know more about wheat and olive trees than I do about politics,” he said, laughing. And, indeed, he gave me a long lecture about the olive tree: its longevity, the depth of its roots. He told me that in Israel there are olive trees that are two thousand years old and were harvested by the Jews during the Second Temple period, from 538 B.C. to 70 A.D. He described their precise location.

When we went back to the cozy living room and he sank into his favorite armchair, he showed me the book he was reading: it was about the Arab Revolt of 1936-39. He said that what interested him was the way the rebellion had ultimately collapsed, causing a disintegration of Palestinian society. He clearly saw a certain similarity between the revolt of the nineteen-thirties and the intifada that began in 2000. In time, it became evident that the strategic plan that Sharon was considering involved bringing the Palestinians to a point of political chaos and then luring them into a partial agreement on Israel’s terms—one that would not require evacuation of major settlements in the West Bank and a return to the pre-1967 borders.

“It is impossible at this time to bring about the end of the conflict,” he said. “Therefore we must be cautious. Very cautious. Give the Palestinians only the minimum necessary.”

We met again two years later, in April, 2003, soon after elections; Sharon had easily defeated Amram Mitzna, of Labor. He controlled a majority in parliament and generally dominated the political scene. The Bush Administration had put forward a multi-stage “road map” for a two-state solution in the Middle East but was preoccupied with its war in Iraq. We met at the Prime Minister’s modest office in Tel Aviv, which had been used by David Ben-Gurion. Sharon wore a blue suit tailored to his increasingly mammoth proportions. He chose his words far more carefully than he had before.

“Well, I have made up my mind to make a real effort to arrive at a real agreement,” he said. “I’m seventy-five. I have no political ambitions beyond the position I now hold. And I see it as an aim and a goal to bring this people security and peace. Therefore I shall make very great efforts. I think that this is something that I need to leave behind me: to try to reach an agreement.”

This time, when I asked about the idea of dividing the land between Israelis and Palestinians, he replied, “I believe this is what will happen. It is necessary to see things in a very realistic way: in the end, there will be a Palestinian state. . . . I don’t think that we need to rule over another people and run its life. I don’t think that we have the strength for that.”

Sharon was obviously preparing for a dramatic shift in policy, and the question was what had led him to it. Certainly the strategic context of the world had changed radically. The September 11th terror attacks in New York and Washington, the ceaseless suicide bombings in Israeli cities, the Israeli “re-occupation” of cities in the West Bank, Yasir Arafat’s encirclement and decline—they were all factors in Sharon’s thinking. There was also the moderating influence of his sons; of Reuven Adler, an advertising executive who was his best friend and political strategist; and of his adviser Dov Weissglas. Although it was hard to figure out which of these events or influences had been most important, it was clear that Sharon had decided to divert history from its course.

I asked if he was prepared to consider the evacuation of isolated settlements. “If we reach a situation of real peace, true peace, a peace for generations,” he replied, “we will have to make painful concessions.” This, Israelis soon discovered, was to become a resonant phrase in Israeli political life, but I asked if it wasn’t actually an empty one.

“Definitely not,” Sharon said. “If it turns out that there is someone to talk to, we will have to take steps that are painful to every Jew and painful to me personally. Look, this is the cradle of the birth of the Jewish people. All of our history is connected to those places: Bethlehem, Shiloh, Beit El. And I know that we will have to separate from some of those places. As a Jew, I am tormented by this. But I have decided to make every effort to reach an agreement. The rational need to reach an agreement has overcome my emotions.”

When I left Sharon’s office that day, I found it hard to believe what I’d just heard. Gone were the customary refusals to evacuate settlements, and in their place was an acknowledgment of the fact that the occupation was futile and that Israel would soon have to leave Bethlehem, Shiloh, and Beit El and resign itself to the division of land.

In February, 2004, Sharon acted on his commitment to make “painful concessions,” and described his disengagement plan. In June, he pushed through the cabinet a plan that called for a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and from isolated settlements in the West Bank. In October, he outmaneuvered his rivals in Likud and made the withdrawal into a Knesset resolution. Two months later, he brought the Labor Party into his government to insure a stable political base.

When, in February, 2005, I visited his Jerusalem residence for yet another lavish breakfast meeting, Sharon was not as tense or as circumspect as he had been two years earlier. The majority of Israelis supported him on disengagement from Gaza. By the end of the summer, there was no Netzarim, no Kfar Darom. Thirty-eight years of Israeli occupation of Gaza came to an end with televised scenes of Israeli soldiers dragging Israeli settlers from their homes and synagogues, and of bulldozers levelling Israeli buildings. And it was Sharon—the man who himself was known as “the bulldozer” for both his desire to build new outposts and his brutal means—who had done it. For me, for most of my colleagues, and for most of the Israeli left, even at the beginning of 2005 there was no longer any doubt: the man who sat across from me at the table—Arik of the Paratroopers, Arik the Terrible—had, at seventy-seven, become precisely who he said he would never become, the Israeli de Gaulle.

Nevertheless, he insisted on denying it. “I can’t be de Gaulle,” Sharon said as he ate an omelette. “I can’t be de Gaulle because Algeria is here. It’s not hundreds of kilometres away. This is the difference. The French could take a million people and bring them to France, but in this country there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go.”

Then he laughed and once more played the role of the solicitous host, saying, “Eat, eat. It looks like you’ve lost a little weight.” Sharon, who is five feet seven and was approaching three hundred pounds, clearly had no patience for modern slimming rituals. He said that the cheeses here weren’t quite as good as the cheeses at the ranch, but the housekeeper was doing her best. He himself ate everything and recommended the Portuguese sardines and the schmaltz herring. He was certainly at his most ingratiating. “I heard that you had a son,” he said. “What’s the boy’s name? Michael? Michael is a nice name. Is it because of Michael that you are not eating?”

When the talk of food and children faded, I asked Sharon whether the conflict would have an end.

“The conflict isn’t between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “The conflict is between us and the Arab world. And the problem at the heart of the conflict is that the Arab world does not recognize the Jews’ inherent right to have a Jewish state in the land where the Jewish people began. This is the main problem. This also applies to Egypt, with which we have a cold peace. It also applies to Jordan, with which we have a very close strategic relationship, but this is a relationship between governments, not between peoples. The problem is not 1967. The problem is the profound nonrecognition by the Arab world of Israel’s birthright. This problem will not be solved by an agreement. It will not be solved by a speech. Anyone who promises that it’s possible to end the conflict within a year or two years or three is mistaken. Anyone who promises peace now is blind to the way things are. Even after the disengagement, we will not be able to rest on our laurels. We will not be able to sit under our fig tree and our vine.

“It may be that we will never have peace,” he went on. “And it may be that it will take a great many years to have peace. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk. It’s better to talk than not to talk. It’s important to conduct negotiations. Maybe it’s possible to solve one thing or another. But it has to be understood that the conflict may never be resolved. If it is ever resolved, it will be in a very long process.”

Sharon said that he was certain Israel would live in a state of danger for a long time, and that all he recommended was that Israel not “make any moves in which it takes risks that are too great.”

He continued, “What bothers me about the peaceniks is their hatred of the settlers and their excessive faith in the Arabs. They apparently never got the phone calls I got from my mother when I was conducting talks in Egypt in 1980. My mother, who was eighty at the time, would call me in Cairo and tell me what she had harvested in the field that day and what she was going to harvest the next day. And she would always end with the same sentence: ‘Arik, don’t believe them.’ She had been in this country for many years, but she had a heavy Russian accent. And I remember her very clearly, saying to me, in her heavy Russian accent, ‘Arik, don’t believe them.’ ”

And so, I asked, to this day you don’t believe them?

“No, I don’t believe them,” he said. “And there is a reason for this. The Arabs don’t recognize the Jewish people’s birthright to an independent Jewish state.”

He tried to explain what he derived from this pessimistic assumption. He said that time was the essential factor, which was why he was trying to establish the principle that the Palestinians would have to reform before Israel made further concessions. “The greatest danger is in signing some document and believing that as a result we will have peace. This is not going to happen. . . . Instead, we have to build a process that will enable us to ascertain that indeed a change is taking place in the Arab world. It is necessary to teach all the teachers that Israel is a legitimate entity. And it is necessary to replace all the Palestinian textbooks. And this is beyond the elementary demand for the cessation of terror and the cessation of incitement and the implementation of reforms in the security organizations and the implementation of governmental reforms. It is necessary not to omit a single one of these steps. Under no circumstance should there be concessions. A situation must not develop in which Israel retreats and is chased by terror. Once you accept that, it will never end. Terror will keep chasing us.”

Sharon, it seemed, did not believe in the possibility of a final agreement, or what the negotiators call a “permanent-status agreement.” “What is a permanent-status agreement?” he asked testily. “It is completely unrealistic.”

Throughout Israel, commentators speculated about whether the Gaza withdrawal was merely Sharon’s way of buying time while the Palestinians struggled to bring some order to the miserable enclave that Israel had left behind, and tried to solve their internal political battles. Or was Sharon preparing for another, even more dramatic unilateral move: perhaps an Israeli withdrawal to the separation fence throughout the West Bank?

“There isn’t any possibility of doing this,” he said. “This would be a mistake. . . . There is only one unilateral move. There will not be another unilateral move.”

I asked if he would agree to evacuate twenty or thirty settlements in the West Bank in the near future.

“That isn’t going to happen,” he said. “That isn’t on the agenda. We will discuss that after there are changes among the Palestinians.” He was referring to the requirements imposed on the Palestinians by the U.S.-proposed road map, including an end to terrorism. In any case, Sharon made it clear that the Etzion Bloc, Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, and other large, well-established settlements in the West Bank would never be handed over to the Palestinians. Nor could the Jordan Valley be totally evacuated. “There will be security zones,” he said. “In essential territories that are east of the separation fence, there will be security zones.”

In 2000, at Camp David, Barak and Arafat debated, unsuccessfully, a compromise on control of the Temple Mount, the site of the Western Wall and the Al Aqsa mosque. Sharon was not prepared for such negotiations. “This is the place that is most sacred to the Jewish people,” he said. “It is untenable that it not be under Israeli responsibility.”

I asked him about Hebron, where there is a tiny but fervent Jewish settlement in what is essentially an Arab city.

“Can you conceive that one day Jews will not live in Hebron?” Sharon retorted. “Ben-Gurion called Hebron Jerusalem’s elder sister. If we were a normal nation, when a visitor arrived here we would take him not to Yad Vashem but, rather, to Hebron. We’d take him to the place where our roots are. No other people has a monument like the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah are buried. And Isaac and Rebecca. And Jacob and Leah. There isn’t anything like it. No other people has anything like it. Therefore, under any agreement Jews will live in Hebron.

“We put too much stress on the security issue,” he went on. “That was a mistake. My mistake, too. The element of the cradle of the Jewish people is critical for us to be able to live here. Indeed, there is a constant questioning of our right. Therefore we have to stress the matter of our right. We have to talk about the continuum of Jewish life that has been here. Even in order to live in Tel Aviv, we need a root in Hebron.”

Sharon had not lost the capacity to astound. When I went to interview the “new Sharon” in 2001, I found an old Sharon: stubborn, opportunistic, blunt. When I went to interview the old Sharon in 2003, I found a new Sharon, ready to make radical, painful concessions. And now, in 2005, when the new Sharon was actually leading the withdrawal from Gaza, I was faced with a Sharon more old than new. Even when he was altering the course of history, he did not cease to be enigmatic, unpredictable.

The old liberal opinion of Sharon was that he was a liar, and, certainly, his relationship with truth was complex. He was very cautious about revealing his views, but he did not lie gratuitously. Therefore, when he told me in 2001 that he would not evacuate the Gaza settlement of Netzarim, that was what he really believed. But when circumstances changed so did he. He was prepared to destroy with his own hands much of what he himself had built.

The new opinion of Sharon was that he was a tactical genius and a strategic ignoramus. Some on the right said that he was a champion windsurfer: he knew how to surf the waves of history while having no idea where he was going. The answer to the enigma of Sharon, they said, is that he actually has no world view—no principles, no ideals, no integrity. Without the slightest difficulty, he could establish settlements in one decade and demolish them in another.

But what stood out most in the twenty hours of taped conversation that I had conducted with Sharon over six years was his emotional consistency, his fixed beliefs. Even when he was absorbed in the work of uprooting settlements, he spoke emotionally about their value. His policy changed dramatically, but his inner self did not change at all.

I asked him whether he felt any guilt toward the settlers he had sent to Gaza and was now displacing from their homes. Instead of replying, he asked one of his aides for a quotation from Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing, Revisionist leader, and then he read it aloud:

We have never seen a settlement as an end in and of itself. We have seen it as one of the most powerful means of state-oriented Zionism for achieving our sovereignty over the land of Israel. To us, a settlement has been precious as one of our finest cards in the statesmanship game of the future. But should this settlement suddenly become an impediment in the crucial statesmanship game—to this we shall not agree. A settlement is a means and no more than that. The fact that we love its green orchards, its golden fields and its proud laborers is irrelevant. For us, they are the political avant-garde. It happens that for the sake of a common interest the avant-garde suffers severe losses. We send them our blessings and continue on our way.

Sharon removed his glasses and waited for a response.

“That’s you,” I said.

“True,” he said, “except for the last line, which I don’t like.”

I said that someone who knew him well had told me that at the personal level he had more human sensitivity than any other Israeli leader. But, when crucial moments came, he looked through the strategist’s binoculars and became cold and cruel.

“I don’t think that I’m cruel,” Sharon said, bristling, “but it is true that in situations like that I pick up the binoculars. If I think about every mother there and every greenhouse there, I won’t be able to do a thing.”

When the Prime Minister’s aides began to pressure us to end the conversation, I asked Sharon whether he was closer to the settlers he was about to displace or to his new supporters, who come from the trendy Mediterranean streets of Tel Aviv.

“They are real people,” Sharon said of the settlers. “Extraordinary people. Phenomenal people.”

He asked an aide to bring him his briefcase, and he pulled out a letter from a woman from Netzarim, in Gaza. He read it to me, slowly and clearly, pronouncing with strange empathy every one of the words of rebuke that were directed at him. “I want to ask you whether you are able to look me straight in the eye and tell me to leave my home, the same home where my son grew up until the age of eighteen, and give it as a gift to the murderers of my son?” the writer demanded. “Hast thou killed and also taken possession?”

“She is right in her arguments,” Sharon said, “but she doesn’t bear the responsibility for the Jewish people on her shoulders. This responsibility is incumbent on me.

“This letter is heartbreaking,” he continued. “The fact is that this whole week I’ve been carrying it around in my briefcase. I’m not happy about destroying the settlements. I’m feeling very bad. These people have led this nation for the past generation. They have done a tremendous deed while taking huge risks. And there was heroism there, especially among the women. And when I think about those women who sent their children to school every day on the bloody roads, I can’t help thinking that they resemble my mother. And this weighs heavily on me.”

I asked Sharon if his mother would have disapproved of what he was about to do.

“This act is not something she would have been very enthusiastic about,” he said. “If she were here, I would explain to her that it is good for the Jews, and she would tell me again not to trust the Arabs. Her generation was a generation of strong people—stronger than us. I don’t consider myself weak, but my parents were stronger.”

Several months later, in July, I met with Sharon again, this time at his Jerusalem office. I gave him a copy of a book that I had published in the meantime, about the partition of the land, and drew his attention to the fact that his copy was inscribed to the partitioner himself. Sharon flipped through the book, pausing at the inscription, and said that he didn’t like what I’d written. That is not how he sees himself. A few weeks before sending the bulldozers to eradicate Netzarim and Kfar Darom, he was still not able to admit that partition would be his legacy.

There was no point in talking about future borders quite yet. Sharon was in the process of withdrawal, and he promised that if violence against Israel came from the Palestinians in Gaza there would be “a very harsh response.”

I asked whether he was preparing a deterrence policy for the post-disengagement era, when Israel and the Palestinians would share borders.

“There would be no alternative,” he replied. “As Moshe Dayan said, we are unable to defend every family and every person in the country. We can promise only that their blood will exact a price. Deterrence is what enables us to live here. This is how it was in the past, this is the way it is in the present, and this is also the way it will be in the future.”

I wondered how Sharon felt about the changed opinion of him in much of the world. The Arab world, and many on the left elsewhere, would never forgive him his early career, especially Sabra and Shatila. But now he was widely respected, even revered, by people who had written him off as the cruel, militaristic ogre of the Zionist occupation.

“This doesn’t intoxicate me,” he said. “I’ve seen them regard me one way and I’ve seen them regard me another way. And I know that it can be the one way again and it can be the other way again. It’s like a huge wheel. Do I feel elation when they admire me in the world? No. Above all, I’m a Jew. And I realize how they came to like me. If the Jews were to disappear, they’d also be happy.

“Today, the Jews are in less danger because Israel is strong,” he went on. “But would I rely on the world with respect to the Jews? No. I don’t rely on anyone in this matter.”

Six years after our first conversation about the Jews, Sharon had returned to his favorite issue.

“The Jews are a wonderful people,” he said. “A people blessed with talents. And a courageous people. But the Jews don’t have enough of a connection to the soil, to the homeland. This is a wandering people. A people without a border.

“When I ask myself where my strength to keep fighting on all fronts comes from, I say that above all it comes from my home, from my family. And this comes to me from the times of my childhood, from irrigating the orchard, from plowing the vineyard, from guarding the watermelon field. These were the things that shaped my character and my ability to cope all my life.”

I asked if that gave him a special role in the life of this people.

“I think that I know what needs to be done,” Sharon replied. “I know what to do because I understand the reality of our life here. For a hundred years now, we have been holding the sword in one hand. I have had the opportunity of seeing this. And what is with me all the time is the necessity to be alert, to be cautious.

“I don’t miss military service,” Sharon added. “I’m not a general who seeks wars. But I am a warrior to this day.

“Years ago, the Egyptian general Kamal Hassan Ali visited me at my home. He looked at me and he looked at the house and he said, ‘This house is like you—big, strong, and isolated.’ In my autobiography, there’s a picture of me in the Yom Kippur War. Here, have a look. Sprawled on the dune alone. And under the photo it says, ‘A lone commander.’ That’s true. There’s nothing to be done about it. In fact, I’m a person who consults. I always consult. But, in the end, you have to take a decision. Now, too. And all the responsibility is on you. You are the one who takes the decision, and in the decision you are always alone.”

On the evening of Wednesday, January 4th, I received a call from the Prime Minister’s office informing me that my next meeting with Sharon had been scheduled for the sixteenth. An hour later, Sharon felt ill and was taken by ambulance from his ranch to Hadassah Hospital, in Jerusalem, with his son Gilad sitting beside him. He could no longer speak, and when Gilad asked whether something hurt he pointed to his temples. In the emergency room, he lost consciousness. As he was being taken to an operating room, Sharon was divested of his authority as Prime Minister. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, the former mayor of Jerusalem, was now in power.

That night, I went out into the empty streets of Jerusalem. The young people I encountered in the few bars that remained open were shocked, and they spoke in nearly apocalyptic terms. They felt that Israel had lost its father. Nearing home, I passed Olmert’s house. Normally, it is a quiet and unexceptional neighborhood, but now my neighbor’s house was surrounded by security teams and their forbidding equipment. The Sharon era had ended.

When I got home, I took out the tapes, transcripts, and notebooks from my meetings with Sharon. All night, I sat in my study, listening to his voice and thinking about what he had left as a political legacy and as a direction for the future. On that long day at the ranch six years earlier, he had spoken emotionally about his great mentor and predecessor, David Ben-Gurion. His eyes gleaming, he told me that, in the fifties, “the Old Man” would invite him home, and would take his Czech rifle out of the cupboard and tell him about his days in the 39th Royal Fusiliers, a Jewish battalion of the British Army in Palestine. Sitting in his tiny bedroom, BenGurion would look at the young officer and tell him how moved and excited he was by the sight of a Jewish fighter born in the Land of Israel.

From the moment the Israeli press understood the seriousness, and, perhaps, the finality, of Sharon’s illness, analysts began trying to understand his historical significance. Some compared him to Ben-Gurion. In fact, Sharon was not a Ben-Gurion, yet his abilities and limitations were equally abundant. Three times, he served Israel aggressively but loyally: in the early nineteen-fifties, when he endowed the Israel Defense Forces with tenacity and spirit; in 1973, when he crossed the Suez Canal and saved Israel from a disastrous defeat; and in 2001-02, when he stood up against a barrage of Palestinian terror, repulsed it, and succeeded in restabilizing the free Israeli society. In all three cases, he was reactive, keeping his wits about him as he organized his forces and fought back. However, when Sharon tried to initiate new geopolitical and diplomatic moves, as Ben-Gurion had in his time, the outcomes were grim. The invasion of Lebanon and the construction of settlements both led to disaster. The outcome of the disengagement in Gaza is as yet unknown. It could easily lead to further chaos and violence among the Palestinians (to some extent, it already has); it could also be the first major step on the road toward a lasting, if uneasy, peace.

Despite his sins and his limitations, Sharon was the leader Israelis wanted at the turn of the century. They voted for Sharon in 2001 and in 2003 and were about to vote for him in 2006, because they felt that he knew that their world, like the world of the Balkans, was about a tribal war. In the midst of this conflict, Sharon, unlike his younger self, tried to calm tempers and reassure his people. And the great majority of Israelis endorsed this. They wanted the inevitable withdrawal from the territories to be carried out with caution, moderation, and a sense of strength—without euphoria or illusions.

Sharon was the least messianic of all of Israel’s Prime Ministers, much less so than Shimon Peres, for example, who spoke of a post-conflict “new Middle East,” of warm comity and interdependent economies. It was Ehud Barak who, at Camp David, undermined the messianism of the left with his failure to entice Yasir Arafat and that of the right by ending the taboo on negotiating the fate of Jerusalem and the rise of a Palestinian state. But it was Sharon who brought to fruition a postmessianic politics. Under his governance, Israel was weaned of the hope for an ideal end. It even came to realize that there would be no absolute peace or victory. Fundamentally, Sharon was a man of process. If he has left a legacy, it is the need for time—lots of time—because there is no way to reach peace with one abrupt act.

In his cumbersome way, he said to the Israelis: I will withdraw. But he also said, I will withdraw very slowly. Shweiyeh shweiyeh, without haste, as an Arabic phrase used in Hebrew slang has it. And I’ll rip them to shreds if they understand my withdrawal incorrectly and abuse it. Because I am not a liberal romantic. I am from here, and I will not be Mahmoud Abbas’s sucker or Kofi Annan’s sucker. I will do only what is good for us. And, just as in the nineteen-forties, fifties, and sixties I conquered land for us, now I will withdraw for us. And, just as in the nineteen-seventies, eighties, and nineties I settled the territories on our behalf, now I will evacuate for us.

Sharon’s three major achievements during the five years of his tenure—his battle against terror; disengagement; and redrawing the political map—were all completed without a clear strategic vision or a concrete philosophy. And they were carried out in a frequently chaotic decision-making atmosphere, with an entire country—and two peoples—dependent on what was going on inside the mind of Ariel Sharon.

In five years, Sharon moved the country from economic and political instability to an unaccustomed level of calm, from a dangerous recession to a resurgent economy, and from international isolation to increased acceptance. Most of all, Sharon enabled Israel to return to being an orderly society, in which the Palestinian issue remained important, even pressing, but not disruptive or worse. In so doing, he gave the first political expression to the new, pragmatic Israeli majority.

All Sharon’s achievements, however, were short term, even perilously so. They were dependent on his presence and on his talent for political maneuvering. Unlike Ben-Gurion, Sharon did not succeed in creating an ethos or an organization that would continue his path; his new party, Kadima, is less than two months old, and its founder will almost undoubtedly not be on its first electoral slate.

Although Sharon came to embody the contemporary mainstream of Israeli politics, he was always a man apart, viewing Israel from a distance, from the niche he had built for himself in the western Negev. It was his sons, Omri and Gilad, who brought him into the center of things, after their mother’s death. Until then, Sharon had been a terrible politician. He always quarrelled with the world, wrapping himself in the isolation of his own absolute rightness. Omri, who was his enforcer in the Knesset, and Gilad, who ran the farm, suggested to their father that the way to victory is not always through confrontation. Together with Sharon’s good friend Reuven Adler and the head of his kitchen cabinet, Uri Shani, the sons built a small and effective political machine for their father that protected him from himself. This machine set clear rules: Sharon does not take decisions on his own that are liable to get him in trouble; there is always someone at his side protecting him from his most belligerent impulses.

Between my interview with Sharon in 2001 and the interview in 2003, this small team helped change him deeply. One day in mid-2002, Adler suggested evacuating Netzarim, arguably the most isolated of the Gaza settlements. Sharon adamantly refused, and he took Adler to Netzarim, explaining that the enclave was important in order to keep an eye on the port of Gaza.

But, gradually, the pressure on Sharon worked. And, above all, there was reality—not least, the demographic reality of a Jewish state overseeing an ever-growing population of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. Sharon saw belatedly that the occupation endangered Israel as a Jewish, democratic state. The status quo was untenable. Both Omri, the more liberal of the two sons, and Gilad pushed their father, and, finally, Sharon realized that he had to act and to create support for essential change. Thus, one of the more striking political miracles in Israeli history took place. Within a few years, the leader of the Israeli attack was transformed into the administrator of the Israeli withdrawal. And an elderly pariah general became the widely beloved leader of the nation, its last patriarchal figure.

While Sharon lies in the neurosurgery unit of Hadassah Hospital, Israel is changing from a society that subordinates its opinion to the judgment of a single individual to one that is critical, searching, almost leaderless. If it is true that Sharon will never return to office—and every medical expert in Israel says that this is almost certainly the case—the likeliest figure to follow him is Ehud Olmert, who is now carrying out the duties of Prime Minister, and who will surely run for the office in March, as Kadima’s candidate. Although Olmert began his career even farther to the right than Sharon, he is more dovish. But, while he is a highly skilled politician, his achievements have been modest. He does not radiate anything like Sharon’s strength, authenticity, or historical presence. The common opinion in Israel is that he will be more susceptible to American pressure and less able to impose his own will on his country. At the moment, the polls indicate that Olmert will defeat his rivals from Likud and Labor, but that is hardly a guarantee that he will be able to move forward on the Palestinian issue with the same assurance and support as Sharon.

Did Sharon know where he was heading? Members of his inner circle have told me the details of the planning process. In the National Security Council, aides were working on four alternatives: evacuating isolated settlements in the West Bank; evacuating an entire settlement region, perhaps one near Nablus, where some of the most extreme zealots live; withdrawing from eighty-eight per cent of the West Bank; and, finally, withdrawing from ninety-two per cent of the West Bank. While this staff worked in secret, some in Sharon’s circle were considering the possibility of withdrawing to the border described by the security wall in return for American recognition of this line as Israel’s permanent border. Others told me they also believed that by the end of the decade Israel would withdraw nearly to the fence line, making the Jordan Valley a security zone but not necessarily under Israeli sovereignty.

It is uncertain whether Sharon finally adopted this idea. Even in internal discussions, knowledgeable sources told me recently, he refused to say where the border would be. He had reconciled himself to the establishment of a Palestinian state, but he demanded that it be disarmed and that it not control Israel’s water sources. He insisted, too, on a continued connection to Hebron and on control of the city of Jerusalem. Sharon believed, they said, that he could exploit the momentum of the disengagement process in order to compel the Palestinians to engage in a gradual diplomatic process that did not end with a “final” agreement. According to one of Sharon’s closest associates, the discussion of a withdrawal to the security wall displeased him. He truly opposed it. His operative plan was quite different: to negotiate an interim agreement with the Palestinians which called on the Israelis to evacuate approximately twenty isolated settlements.

Although Sharon’s politics shifted with time, his prejudices did not. “An Arab is always an Arab,” he would remind his associates, even in recent years. Nor was Sharon terribly impressed by Jews. Again and again, he would say that as individuals the Jews were among the world’s best musicians, scientists, and artists, but as a nation they were problematic. They lacked the fundamental psychology of a healthy, normal nation. For Sharon, Israel was a little farmhouse in the woods, designed not only to protect its inhabitants from attackers who besiege it but also to transform them into arms-bearing farmers, defending their land to the death.

This explains why Sharon was emotional, almost mystical, about the settlements and the settlers. More than once, he told me the story of how, during the 1948 war, there were moments when he felt that the village he was born in might be overwhelmed by the attacking Arabs. At those times, he would say to himself that the disaster would stop at the village cow barns, that the invaders would never cross that line. When, in 1967, on the eve of war, he halted with his armored division at the Egyptian border, he again pondered the possibility of the worst. But then he looked back and saw the lights over the kibbutzim in the Negev. Disaster will stop there, he thought, at the line of the kibbutzim.

Unlike most Israeli commanders, Sharon experienced defeat. In 1948, he was seriously wounded at the disastrous battle for Latrun, a key strategic fortress near the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road that was in Jordanian hands. As a result, he always acknowledged that defeat, and even elimination, was possible. Because he was suspicious of Arabs, mistrusted Jews, and scorned written agreements, he believed only in “facts on the ground.” He wanted a cow-barn line in the hills of the West Bank; he wanted to see the lights over Jewish settlements throughout the occupied territories.

When, in October of 1977, Sharon launched his ambitious settlement project, there were fewer than five thousand Jews living in the territories. Today, there are around a quarter of a million in the West Bank alone. But his endeavor was absurd from the start. Fifteen years after the decolonization of Algeria, he attempted a colonial project that had an idiosyncratic rationale behind it: to create a situation that would force the Jews to defend certain parts of the land whether they liked it or not. If we put only military units at strategic locations in the West Bank, Sharon believed, sooner or later a future Israeli government will order them to withdraw. If, however, a civilian fabric of life develops in the territories, there will be no alternative but to remain. The project had no vision, no political context, and no international legitimacy. Above all, it was profoundly immoral. Israel was somehow fortunate to have the person who made the mess try to clean it up. But, when it came to dismantling the settlements, Sharon once again had no clear vision, no political context, and only a limited degree of international legitimacy.

Sharon never wrote a book of ideas. He never gave a policy speech that clarified his world view. His basic belief was that it is necessary to climb toward the peace summit even without the intention of reaching it. For him, such a summit was a perilous place, from which one might tumble into the abyss of war.

The day before Sharon’s catastrophic stroke, I happened to be at Sycamore Ranch to meet with Omri. I did not see the Prime Minister, but I did see, once again, everything in which he took pride: his sheepfold, his orchard, his two sons. It had been a difficult day. That morning, Omri had resigned from the Knesset because of a campaign-financing scandal, which could land him in prison, and on the evening news there were renewed allegations that the Sharons had received millions of dollars illegally. A little later, two Qassam rockets, fired from Gaza, landed nearby.

Sharon’s ranch is situated on the site of Huj, a Palestinian village that was demolished, like so many others, in 1948. Sharon once took me to see some of the remains of Huj on his land. He did not feel comfortable talking about the former inhabitants, who fled as refugees. So, after the Qassams fell and the Israeli artillery began pounding back, I thought of that tour, of Sharon’s frontier farmhouse and the village it stood upon. I thought of the role that Sharon had played in our lives for more than fifty years. I thought of him as the visceral warrior that Zionism had sent to deal with the Palestinians on its behalf and of how emotional he was when he told me that, as a boy of nine, he would sit on a stool in his mother’s kitchen reading to her the news of Jews killed by Palestinians in 1937 during the Arab Revolt. I thought of him now, old and weak, hearing the Qassam rockets landing near his ranch. The next evening, he collapsed. ♦

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